• Question: What's your favorite experiment? #AskEveryone

    Asked by Catriona to Alan, Ciorsdaidh, Lauren, Leonie, Martin, Neil, Shuo on 6 Mar 2018. This question was also asked by jimmy, Milly, liammchogg10.
    • Photo: Martin McCoustra

      Martin McCoustra answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      There’s a lot of neat experiments in the history of science that I could pick as an answer to this question. However, I’m not going to… What I will say is that sometimes the simplest of experiments can give you the most direct insight into the way things work. A good scientist should try to keep their experiments simple to gain that insight.

      However, I will say that as a kid at school, I used to experiment often, for example making things that smelt nasty! A lot of chemists that I know did that same as kids!

    • Photo: Lauren Webster

      Lauren Webster answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      If you ask any medicinal chemist what reactions they do on a daily basis they would reply with either amide couplings (acid + amine) or some sort of palladium catalysed reactions (using metals). But there are so many different ways to do these types of reactions i.e. use of different reagents. So what I would say is that within each “type” of reaction there is a favourite way to do it. For example, my favourite amide coupling reagent is using a substance called EDC, HOBt (an explosive), a base called Et3N (triethylamine) and solvent such as DCM (dichloromethane). My favourite palladium catalysed reaction is a Suzuki (and no not named after the car haha).

    • Photo: Alan McCue

      Alan McCue answered on 7 Mar 2018:

      My favourite experiment is the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide (also known as elephants toothpaste). Its spectacular! Have a look at the YouTube video link:

    • Photo: Ciorsdaidh Watts

      Ciorsdaidh Watts answered on 7 Mar 2018:

      A great outreach experiment is extracting DNA from fruit, like strawberries, using washing up liquid, salt and alcohol. It’s super easy to do AND you get to see all the strands of DNA with the naked eye.

    • Photo: Neil Keddie

      Neil Keddie answered on 8 Mar 2018:

      In my own work, I do some of my reactions in a special chemistry microwave (not the one you’d heat your beans in though!). This allows me to do reactions under high temperatures and pressures, which helps to make some reactions work, that don’t when you heat them normally.

      For demonstrations my favourite is the reaction between burning magnesium and dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) – see it here:

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